


Two Weeks

by Cerfblanc



Series: Dan, Abra [3]
Category: Doctor Sleep (2019)
Genre: Angst, Brother-Sister Relationships, Dreams, Ex-Alcoholism, F/M, Gen, Intuition, Motels, One Night Stands, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychic Bond, Slightly Awkward Sex, Uncle-Niece Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:42:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21584755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerfblanc/pseuds/Cerfblanc
Summary: She's stood in the dark, open doorway of her motel room when Dan finds himself staring at her and that stupid smile, but then the girlish, warm face slowly changes into something more womanly; the intense grey eyes and moist brow, the indecisive blink and slit between the lips—Dan knew the euphoric feeling like the back of his hand.
Relationships: Abra Stone & Dan "Danny" Torrance, Lucy Stone & Dan “Danny” Torrance, Original Female Character/Dan “Danny” Torrance
Series: Dan, Abra [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533671
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	Two Weeks

**Author's Note:**

> Some sections of this work may make reference to the book, but the majority is film-based and inspired, and it also turned out wayyyyy longer than expected. Whilst writing this I listened to Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus” (super melancholic, would definitely recommend) and thought it suited the topics and vibes in the fic. 
> 
> Also, “Lois” is an original character in this story. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy! A kudo or comment would be much appreciated! <3

A word for Abra's mother. Lucy Stone was a pretty, but also arguably attractive brunette woman of thirty-something, with a youthful eye and a refined ski-slope nose, who smiled with a charitable pair of lips and a prominent Cupid's bow, and was also a woman that coincidentally happened to be Dan's half-sister. 

Jack Torrance had done it with another woman that probably bore the same ageless girlishness Lucy bore in her whole demeanour, six years or so after Dan's birth—a timid receptionist, perhaps, had been taken advantage of. Or a secretary; one that was married to some small town business that never did financially well but somehow still stood standing. Dan had quickly established his father was drawn to the unadulterated gaze of a twenty-four year old with small shoulders, whilst being ten to twelve years their oppressively condescending senior, along with a pearly white grin and a cloying charisma that could only belong to an absolute psycho. 

Dan had never met someone so apprehensive but quietly confident at the same time. Whilst Lucy's obvious anxiety had been born from Abra's abilities, she maintained it reasonably well and moved linearly like any other mother. However, despite her strength to behave like everything was completely normal, Dan could pick up on that she was in a constant state of awareness—a sliver of fear, maybe, had slipped into her head too. Not fear of her own daughter, but of what she was capable of. She feared the repercussions of what Abra could potentially put into motion.

"Abra is going on a student exchange." Lucy had said to Dan with an unsettled sort of smile, crossing one leg over the other at the kitchen table, naturally filed nails tapping the sides of the mug of coffee she held with both hands. She nibbles the inside of her bottom lip. Casts a downward glance at her coffee. Blinks a few times. Dan could see the white of her knuckles through her skin. Fidgeting was one of her coping mechanisms, he had established that even before he had met her, from what Abra had briefly described to him within their short time of knowing each other. 

"She'll enjoy it." He responded shortly, and genuinely, because without a doubt Abra _would_ enjoy it. She would meet new people and make new friends, gain more social experience, feel new energies and explore her Shine a little bit more—in the most natural way, too. She wouldn't have to force it. Everything would come to her. "It'll be a good learning curve," Dan adds once he sees Lucy's pale face. "You've nothing to worry about."

"She's going to Europe for two weeks." She says.

"What?"

Her eyes fixate themselves on Dan as she brings the mug to her mouth, her cheeks hollowing inwards to reveal the round apples of her cheekbones. Dan expects her to say something more, but she doesn't.

"Whereabouts in Europe?" He asks.

Lucy hesitates irritatedly, "England."

"Guns are illegal there. She'll be safe."

"For fuck's sake Dan!" She slams down the mug, and the sound of ceramic hitting hardwood makes him flinch and want to shrink away from the shrillness of her voice. "I'm not worried about where she's _going_ —that's the least of my worries—are you that stupid?"

"What are you so anxious about then?"

She sometimes insulted people when she was angry at herself for whatever reason, and even though it seemed like she meant it she never did. She runs her fingers through a lock of her hair, still agitated, but Dan feels her impulsive frustration vanish as quick as it had appeared, and he's suddenly looking at not a woman but an alarmed girl as young as her own daughter, "...She's just going to be...so far _away_...for two solid weeks."

"Then don't let her go." Dan says simply. Maybe a little too honestly, now that he notices how ticked off she had become with his faint responses. But everything he was saying was true. Matter of fact. Nothing personal. Women were too emotional, for sure.

" _Dan_ —"

"What the hell are you wanting me to say then?"

Lucy turns quiet. Dan watches her. She doesn't say anything. He wait a few seconds more for her to open her mouth. But she doesn't. He waits another second. Nothing. Another. Nothing. A minute gone. Just a blank female face, and an internally observant half-brother.

It hits him then.

"Are you...afraid of someone finding her?" Dan eventually says.

"It's because you won't be with her."

"That's not an issue. I've always been with her. She's always been with me."

"I don't think your—communication—works as best when you're not there in person. I'm not stupid."

Dan folds his arms across his chest and leans back in his seat; he stares intently past his sister's eyes, her whole physicality and into her mental void, all within less than a second—and he torrents his words straight into the forefront of her head in the format of a single thought: _'You underestimate me.'_

When he blinks himself out of the process she automatically recoils by shutting her eyes and bringing her fingers to touch her temples, her soft brow creasing into an uncomfortable frown, and when she opens her eyes to meet his she clenches her jaw in defeat.

Dan tries not to smile at what Abra would probably say was "amateur" or "petty" but he couldn't help but feel somewhat elevated from proving Lucy wrong in one of the most convincing and possibly frightening ways—but regret suddenly dashes him in the stomach, and he felt awfully arrogant.

"I didn't mean to frighten you," Dan says quickly, "I just wanted to prove—"

"It's fine." Lucy pulls a tight smile, nods once, kind of reluctantly. Her pride had been dropped into the flames of telepathy. "I asked for it. My bad."

* * *

The night before he was due to travel with Lucy and Abra to the airport at some ridiculous hour of the morning, a familiar, bodily tremor shuddered under Dan's skin as he plonked his head into his pillow. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck and along his forearms stand tall in the cool air of his rented accommodation. He had closed his eyes when, approximately three hours later and bang on two o'clock in the morning, he felt wet, icy, womanly nails rake across his bare stomach. Dan had knocked his skull against the headboard of the bed whilst whipping the duvet off his body, in attempt to catch whatever had prodded him, but there was nothing under the sheets but him—lying in a cool sweat.

High on adrenaline, he breathes hard and reaches over to turn on his bedside lamp. In the mellow light he sits up and looks around. There was nothing. Only the distant hum of the boiler beneath his room. Dan glanced at the bathroom, drew his gaze away, but then ended up looking back at it in realisation. In the soft yellowy light that emitted from the lamp he could see remnants of water along the wooden floor. It started within the open door of the bathroom—he had shut that door before he went to sleep—and ended at the foot of his bed.

The initial fright that had plagued him was replaced with an animosity that made him want to rip the door off its hinges. He gets up and strides into the bathroom, desperate to strangle the damn whore—but she wasn't there. For once he wanted her to be there, just so he could gouge her eyes out, hammer that melting leer off her face, and watch her shrivel away under the violent blow of his fists.

Despite the woman's disappearance Dan could smell the foul odour of her skin linger in the air. In his fit of fury he ends up tearing the shower curtain down from its rail, tired and weary, but livid with an indescribable anger he could only associate with his father. "Can't hide now, _bitch_."

* * *

"You've...got those circles again." Abra half-mumbles at Dan (whom was too occupied with watching the road ahead of him) and reaches out a weary hand to pat his weathered cheek, little fingers feeling his stubble. "Ew, itchy."

"Circles?" Dan mimics flatly, not really listening. He couldn't believe Lucy had decided to quit going with them to drop Abra off at the airport, though he had a gut feeling she was going to pull some sort of irrational stunt based upon an anxiety that was borderline ridiculous. He wanted to have it out with her right then and there, outside the open front door under the blue dawn and say to her _'stop fucking worrying and get in the fucking car,'_ but she had already shut the door in his face before he could begin to argue. Abra hadn't been bothered. She was rarely fazed by last-minute decisions. She had kissed and squeezed her mother before leaving, promising to call her every night for a fortnight and happily slid into the front seat of the car.

"Yeah, they suit you." Abra continues, and almost pokes Dan in the eye.

He swats her hand away. "Stop it, I'm driving."

"Sorry."

After a minute of content silence she perks up again.

"You seem annoyed." She says.

Dan hesitates, "Someone broke my sleep last night. Kept me up for hours. I'm just tired."

"Billy?"

"No."

"Who, then?"

He stops momentarily, wonders if he should even tell her, but does it anyway. "The bathtub-bitch."

She laughs at that, giggles a little afterward. "She's harmless."

"She was the scariest thing in the world when I was kid, I'll have you know."

"Put you off women, did it?"

"Abra."

"Sorry."

Another minute of silence. A minute of thought, for Dan. "What was that supposed to mean?"

"Because you're like—the most single person I know. Forty-something and unmarried. Is a man of the people but a total loner. Best friends with a _cat_."

"I'm like that for reason." _Cats are better than people_ , Dan thinks.

"I think you would be good with someone, that's all." She says. "They would be lucky to have you. You're already too nice."

"Too nice?" He repeats.

She makes a notion with her hand, kind of dismissively. She was tired as he was. "Soft."

Soft was right. Dan was the most palpable of men for sure, despite his laboured exterior, but only Abra knew that. The omnipresent god-child that knew every damn thing under the damn sun. Somewhere beyond his security of lockboxes and mental sanctuaries of phobic memoirs Abra could probably pull out an answer true to Dan's experience if he asked her upfront. Soft, was quite accurate, but Dan thought otherwise.

"I'm not that good." He utters sub-consciously. 

"What?" Abra yawns.

"Go to sleep. I'll wake you up once we're there."

For the rest of the drive Dan thinks aimlessly whilst stopping and turning down roads and reading signs and checking the time, and allows his head to ponder elsewhere. _Sleep forever, Abra Stone. Your mother will be assured until she dies if you do, and I'll be your guardian angel with a ball and chain attached to both my ankles until the day I leave for the hereafter. Which will be never. Because I'm stubbornly dedicated, and you've already figured that out._

* * *

"Have fun, yeah?" Dan says the words with an audible tremor of doubt, after briefly introducing himself to the three teachers that would be escorting the group of twelve students to the U.K., and all of a sudden he felt like he was turning into Lucy once they were stood near the airport check-in.

"Yeah, I will." Abra responds without looking up at her uncle. She was rummaging through her backpack for her phone. Once she's found it she looks at him with a hesitant expression he can't quite decipher until she speaks, "You don't have to check up on me whilst I'm away. I'll visit you instead. Might be easier."

"Sure." he replies shortly, with a slight nod. He purses his lips for a second. "Whatever you want. Remember to call your Mom." Upon instinct Dan slips his hands into his jean pockets as he watches Abra glance in the direction of where the rest of the group were checking-in their luggage. She looks back at Dan with slight apprehension. Perhaps with meagre awkwardness too, but he wasn't as sensitive to notice it.

She then pulls a grin. "Will you miss me?"

Dan lets out a breathless laugh, one in between a humorous chuckle and a noise of disbelief at the cheek of her, along with a pang of reluctant realisation—what the hell was he going to do for two weeks without her anyway? Sure, he had work. He would talk to patients. And the cat. He had Fridays, and the weekends off. He would visit Lucy then. He would sleep. Maybe hatch a plan to beat up the bathtub woman when he finds the right anger to do it. What made his time whole and worth spending was because nobody other than Abra had been able to mould Dan's life into what was his current satisfaction.

To eliminate the oncoming silence Abra is the first to pull Dan into a hug, standing on the balls of her feet to reach her arms round his neck, and he squeezes her in return. She felt awfully small in his arms, and he catches one of her wrists, caresses the skin on the back of her hand with the face of his thumb, and as she pulls away her strength assures him when he notices the thin wiry muscle that was woven within her forearms.

"Bye." She says. Quietly confident, like her mother, she leaves.

Dan watches until she finally disappears ten minutes later, out of sight but still in mind, along with the group of students and the trio of teachers, Abra's liberating presence sticking out amongst them like the blazing sun amid millions of plain-Jane stars.

* * *

He dreamed of the woman and child he abandoned that night, eight years ago.

His sub-conscious woke to find her arm draped across him, and in a cautious, desperate attempt to slither off the bed and hopefully out of the memory, her ashen hand jerked and her bitten nails dug into his forearm. She was cold, and when Dan looked up to see her sickly grey eyes he notices the toddler curled into her chest.

A white substance spilled through the crevices of the woman's body, and Dan was met with a faint smell he new all too well but couldn't begin to describe—it was sweet, almost flowery, earthy in undertone, natural as a whole, and then shot to the toxic odour of gasoline and battery acid.

Once spiked with adrenaline Dan yanks his arm away and feels the phantom pain of blood rising through fresh scratches along his skin. When he momentarily glances down to see the damage and look back up the woman and child had vanished from the bed, along with the cocaine.

He wakes up and is unable to go to sleep again without feeling nauseated, every time he curled onto his side. The bed felt damp and clammy.

Body betraying him, he changes the sheets and forces himself to close his eyes, half-suffocating himself in his pillow, his breathing shallow, and he can't help but think when she had watched him break someone's nose in that godforsaken bar, whilst being strangely titillated and unfazed by the violence; it had drove her to girlishly cling to him the whole night, and Dan had slept with her less than an hour later. Upon his absence the following morning, at some tragic point within those eight years, that girl and her little toddler died.

* * *

Four days had passed since Abra's departure, and Dan had felt utterly aimless even though he was continuing with what he did routinely. He never saw her throughout his working weeks but visited on weekends. An undeniable absence had started to grow within him and he hated it; he suddenly felt as if he were a child again, and the feeling triggered the thought of his dark-haired pure-at-heart mother. He remembers her warm dry hands and the genuineness that emitted from her whole being.

The one-off (thankfully reversible) mess had began when Dan somehow found himself lingering like a ghost within one of the local bars situated within Frazier, on a late, dark, moody evening of a Sunday.

He was sat at the counter on one of the stools in an oddly quiet headspace, something he thought would have cracked from trauma the second he stepped into the social setting, but it didn't. Maybe his body didn't recognise the triggers anymore, and he was finally free to disappear and appear within any alcohol-infused, drug-ridden pub and simply observe—or perhaps he had mastered the skill at detaching himself from anything and everything.

The atmosphere was warm and almost film-like, as if every perspective of the bar Dan had was taken through the lens of a thirty-five millimetre camera. Noise and grain were produced through the low conversations in booths, a young group circled around the pool table—he hears laughter. Dan's last trip to a place like this had occurred before he settled in Frazier; the accidental death of the woman and her toddler a memory to petrify him out of drifting and being able to relax in what was meant to be a social activity.

He was ready to leave until a young woman came and sat beside him. "Hello." She says with a grin Dan automatically associated with nobody other than Abra.

He hesitates, kind of stunned. "Hi."

"Can I buy you a drink?" She wasn't American. Foreign, but somehow not foreign. She was western for sure, perhaps European. Her smile was girlish and the kind that would get you into shit—Dan really didn't need that.

He smiles back to be polite, and goes to shift off his seat. "I was just leaving."

She rolls her eyes so far they turn white for a split second. "You always this boring?"

"Excuse me?"

"I said, how are you doing?"

He stops and looks at her, and she looks back with a stare intense and fixed to his eyes. A small smile creeps onto her lips again, as if she were being told something funny. She had long ashen hair, thin and formless, which painfully contrasted with her pearly, moonlit complexion; polished, childish eyes, fairly prominent cheekbones and a toothy grin that wouldn't disappear. If you looked close enough, and if she smiled enough, the pink of her gums showed.

Dan was somewhat captivated, but not by her prettiness—it was her vitality that drew him in to linger and think of something else to counter her cheekiness, but he couldn't get the words out.

"You seem to be doing good." She answers the question for him, "I'm doing good too." As the bartender approaches the woman asks Dan if he wanted anything for the second time; he shook his head, and she ordered something he didn't quite catch. He casts a downward glance to make himself stop trying to calculate her, and notices she was juvenilely rocking one foot back and forth under the bar counter.

"Stupid place to come if you don't drink." She says, and he meets her intense gaze, eyes unblinking.

"Yeah. I suppose it is." He answers shortly.

"You really don't drink?"

Dan hesitates, "Ex-alcoholic."

Her face turns solemn with understanding then, "Oh," and she nods, but seconds later she grins again (much to Dan's puzzlement). "Kinda cool, though. Sounds like ex-policeman, or something like that, y'know?" She drums her fingertips on the sticky dark surface of the bar. "I like the sweet drinks. Everything else taste likes nail varnish remover. What did you like?"

 _Everything_ , he only thinks it but doesn't say it, "Nothing now."

He suddenly feels her drumming fingers run over his left hand. "No ring?" She asks.

"What? No—none of that." He pauses and warily resorts to a quiet voice. "I'm past that. I've no time."

"And you have time to be hanging around a bar for no reason? You're a weird one." She counters in the same quiet voice, mimicking him, leaning toward him on both folded elbows. "I'm a weird one too."

 _Am I really doing this?_ The dreaded thought rang throughout his head. Before he can even consider what he was doing was sensible he asked the question that was practically acceptance of the situation, "What's your name?"

The young woman's rocking foot stops, and she pulls back from her unsophisticated position like an ocean wave sliding against rolling sand. "Lo."

"Lo?"

"For Lois."

"Lois."

"Yes—who're you?"

"Dan."

"Danny?"

"No, just Dan."

"I'm calling you Danny." Lois declares as the bartender sets down the drink she ordered. It was a concoction of an Irish cream. He watches her take a sip of it with both hands, as if she were drinking hot chocolate.

" _God is my judge_." She says.

"What?"

"That's the meaning of your name," she answers, "isn't it?"

Dan searched her face for a moment, tries to find any deep-rooted intuition in her, but he found nothing. She was just...normal. "Is that your attempt at flirting?" He asks quite flatly.

"No," she laughs, "flirting is out of fashion. I don't do it. I just like to talk to people. There's no pressure with talking, is there?"

"No, I suppose not." Dan observes her as she sips her drink again. She was somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-six.

"Have you decided to stay?" Lois asks.

"Sure." Dan says. In reality Dan wasn't sure at all. He didn't know what he wanted from this. He didn't know why he was doing this.

* * *

He ended up being slammed in the chest with a bad case of anxiety when he realised how drunk she had gotten. Two and a half hours had passed, and surprisingly, Dan had enjoyed talking to her—she kept coming out with all sorts of stories and questions, they debated, agreed and disagreed, discussed and ranted, and whilst this was happening she had downed God knows how many glasses of "sweet drinks."

"I'm—I'm in a motel twenty minutes down the road," Lois says with on a weary note, lanky bare arms stretching across the counter to tip the bartender. She drops a coin in the process.

"I'll drive you back." Dan responds, and checks the time. Eleven. He wasn't tired. He felt a little energised, actually.

"You will?"

"Yeah. You're drunk."

"I don't think so. I feel fine." As she stands up she drops what Dan presumed were her keys to her room. He goes to pick them up before she does.

"That's exactly what someone would say if they're drunk."

Lois makes a sound of disapproval. "And how the fuck would you know?"

 _She's stoned alright_ , Dan thinks. "Because I've lived it."

Just as they leave through the exit and into the bitter cold air of the blue Sunday night, Dan feels Lois slip a spindly arm around his waist, attempting to latch onto him. The interaction makes him tense. 

"What are you doing?" He asks, a little too quickly, but she isn't fazed by it.

"I don't want to fall. I'll look stupid."

"Oh. Right."

When they reach his car she ends up tripping and stumbles into the side of the open passenger door—she bursts into laughter, even though their was blood trickling down both pale knees, and Dan finds himself smiling a little, despite the state she was in.

"Come on, I'll help you in." He says, knelt down, his hands trying to find ways to help her without touching the vast majority of her bare skin, but the slip dress she wore didn't assist in what he was attempting to do.

"Fuck, that's embarrassing." She goes to wipe her palms on her knees, and he stops her, and she mumbles something about him being too touchy, and she grabs his forearm to pull herself up from the concrete ground.

"Not as embarrassing as starting a riot." He says.

"You talking from experience?"

"Maybe."

* * *

The motel Lois resided at was a relatively small development, with an incurious fifty-year-old caretaker at the desk, and less than a dozen inhabitants on the lot. She had used the thin cotton of her knee-length dress to dab away at the grazes on her knees. She giggled all the way to her door, Dan having to turn the key in the lock, prepared to leave the instant she smiled one last time and said goodbye, half-sober but half-not, the dreamy energy being exchanged between them transforming back into the vitality of reality, but none of that happens.

She's stood in the dark, open doorway of her motel room when Dan finds himself staring at her and that stupid smile, but then the girlish, warm face slowly changes into something more womanly; the intense grey eyes and moist brow, the indecisive blink and slit between the lips—Dan knew the euphoric feeling like the back of his hand.

He doesn't reject Lois when her fingers grasp the front of his jacket and she pulls him into the room, the door slamming shut, bodies being plunged into bluish obscurity, and as if on cue he feels her lips against his. Instinctively he shrugs off what he could of his clothing, Lois letting out a yelp when he accidentally steps on her toes, and to compensate he attempts to help take off her dress but his fingers end up tearing through the delicately sewn buttons that were set along the material at her sternum.

"Shit, sorry." He utters between a kiss.

"It's fine." She says with a giggle and to his shock she summons the strength to shove him against the closest cold wall of the motel room. It turns into a game that uses the back and forth rule, it almost becomes an art, and Dan tries to remember the last time he had been with someone (apart from that occurrence, the one that took place eight years ago) experiencing the events of what he assumed was going to be a one-night-stand.

When he's eventually guided to the bed he almost suffocates her with his weight, there's so much skin, and her breathing quickly becomes shallow and raspy against the crook of his neck, but she doesn't say anything—she was probably still out of it to even realise—and Dan tries not to crush her whilst fumbling to unzip the front of his jeans. At first it was hopeless. He was pushing against something that didn't want him anywhere near it, and it was a total contradiction because Lois was still kissing and groping him all over, acceptant and willing—women were fucking complicated, even physically. Dan wished that the two of them would just collapse into a dreamless sleep in that instant, pretend they had done it, and that would be the end of it. He could leave. He didn't hook up as often as he did because he was, quite frankly, tired and exhausted in ways he couldn't have even imagined until now.

"Screw it," Dan breathes aloud, ready to stop in that instant but Lois doesn't hear him. With a new determination he feels her hand slips below in between their pressed stomachs and grasps his shaft; he shudders at the unintentional graze of her nails, and seconds later he is suddenly locked into an incredibly tight, pillowy, pressured warmth.

Lois swaddles her arms around his neck, and Dan presses his forehead against hers, noses bumping and lips brushing, but they don't kiss, both in fear of losing concentration. Dan is unable to restrain himself when she guides one of his hands to fondle her breast, the laboured skin of his palm rough and weathered, and his hips thrust into her body (obviously the wrong way, because she swears at him) with a slight stab.

"You'll make me bleed if you do it like that." She points out, and the womanliness that initially turned him on had turned into a callow projection of a girl newly matured. After three minutes of hot friction Dan feels his body shudder and he's unable to hold himself; his vision blurs and turns white around the edges, and he pulls out and ejaculates onto her abdomen. Without question he goes to kiss her lips, and slides his hand into the front of her underwear to bring her to finish.

"Sex isn't pretty." Lois murmurs into the darkness of the room, ten minutes later, drowning in the afterglow. Dan lay beside her with one arm across draped across his forehead, as if shielding himself from what was to come next.

"It's not meant to be." He answers. _What if that was her first time?_ The thought punctures him and he wants the clammy bed to swallow him up. _I really hope it wasn't, because that was awful._ "You've...done it before, haven't you?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Good."

"Did you think I hadn't?"

When Dan doesn't respond in fear of embarrassment Lois laughs.

"I didn't hurt you, did I?" He asks quietly. She sits up, and in the faint moonlight that emitted from the bare window of the room he could see her naked form—skin dewy, untainted, opalescent—and she brings her delicate fingers to touch at the mess on her belly.

"No. You didn't." She answers, still inspecting. She rubs the stuff between her fingers, and he was having mixed feelings about whether or not it turned him on.

"How old are you?" Dan asks.

"Does it matter?" Lois counters.

Dread pierces his gut then. The last thing he wanted to know was that he had sex with a minor, and before he knew it he started to analyse her—she does look young enough to be sixteen; her face wasn't just young, it was child-like, and her mannerisms and the way she spoke and what she did and how she presented everything. God, he really was stupid. A chill went up Dan's spine and he felt like he could puke right then and there if what he thought was true. 

"Yes, it does," He adds more firmly, and repeats himself, "how old are you?"

Lois turns to look at him, her long hair covering her chest. "I turned nineteen last month." She watches him purse his lips together as he stares at the ceiling. _It could be worse_ , Dan thinks. He searched her thoroughly moments later to check if she wasn't lying.

"How old are you?" She says. It was only fair he answered her question too.

Dan falters a little, but comes out with it anyway. "Forty, I'm pretty sure." He was curious to ask why she had picked him instead of someone that was younger and closer to her own age, rather than a guy who was twenty-one years her senior. The only disturbing, oddly and arguably attractive thing about that was the aesthetic contrast in their bodies.

"You don't even know your own age?" Lois says, almost teasingly.

"I said _forty_."

There's a slight pause, and Dan feels a bubbly radiance emit from her. "Wanna know something cool?"

He sighs inwardly. "Sure."

"In another ten years you'll be half a century."

He was skeptical as to whether she was being genuinely serious or sarcastic, (or both) but he replies anyway. "Great."

"Wanna know something else?" She adds. She didn't seem to care that he wasn't fully engaging himself in the conversation.

"Okay." Dan says, as he closes his eyes. He wanted to sleep. Badly.

"Freud thinks we're all sub-consciously attracted to people that look like our parents."

"How the hell does that work?"

"It means women would be attracted to people that look like their fathers, and vice versa with men and their mothers."

"That's disturbing."

"Yeah." He hears her swallow. "...I've always wondered how the concept would work if you had no parents at all. Or if you didn't know what they looked like. Or if you haven't met them."

They bask in the silence that surrounded them after that. Dan begins to slowly drift into a doze until he feels Lois' weight shift and disappear from the bed. He opens his eyes and watches her skulk around the corner to the bathroom. A yellow light spills onto the carpeted floor, he hears the running water of the shower cut through the silence, and she pokes her head out the open door. The light made her skin luminously warm.

"Wanna shower with me?" She offers.

Dan shuts his eyes again, sighs through his nose. He tries to think but is unable to. "I'll go in after."

A beat, then another longing reply, "You sure?"

 _Why the fuck is she doing this to me_ , he thinks. He felt like a well-behaved collie trudging back to its owner after a long run when Dan found himself stood under the hot water seconds later, with his arms snaked around the girl's waist, his fingers tracing the angular ridges of her rib cage,and his lips brushing the nape of her neck.

* * *

Dan had to admit—that was the best seven hours of sleep he had gotten so far within the year. 

He evaluated the night in his head when he naturally woke somewhere between seven-thirty and eight o'clock in the morning. _Randomly waltzed into a bar after eight years of trauma, got picked up by a girl I thought was a potential minor, had sex, received a surprise blowjob in the shower, and slept._ Dan had immediately protested when Lois gradually slid lower and lower, said she didn't have to, but his Id ego got the better of him almost instantly. When they were back in bed, Lois had curled into his side and mumbled something along the lines of _"you're the first man I've met that makes a utility jacket and checked shirt look hot"_ before falling asleep.

Now awake and aware, Dan can see Lois' face in full naked light. She was in a deep sleep and Dan quickly figured it was because of the drink. He predicts she would wake up two or three hours later in the day with a splitting headache. Quietly, he gets up from the bed and washes his face before scouting the floor for his clothes. It took him longer to locate his car keys. Once fully dressed he finds his phone under one of the bedside tables. There he finds four texts from Abra, and one from Lucy.

It felt as if he had entered another world the night before, where nothing mattered and nothing properly existed, not even the people he knew and loved. The only things he knew were real and established in that world were attraction, sex, and the person you were joined with both physically and mentally. Dan shunned himself, but then reprimanded his initial thoughts. You were allowed to lose yourself once in a while. Dan hadn't done so for years.

When he makes his way for the closed door of the motel room he stops in his tracks, and turns back to where Lois slept soundly. He padded across the room, to her side of the bed, and kissed her brow before leaving.

Before driving off Dan sat in his car and read through the text messages he had received.

**Abra / 18:23PM : _Uncle Dan! Hey, I hope you're not worried about me, the exchange has been soooooo much fun so far, though Mom has been messaging non-stop. Tell her to cool it at some point, will you? I know she's afraid of something happening to me whilst I'm away. She's really got no reason to worry. Please tell her that :/_**

**Abra / 18:25PM : _Also, I'll come see you tonight for sure! Since it's been a few days and I said I would._**

**Abra / 18:26PM: _I've already got so much to tell you about. I met someone I can talk to!! You know the way we talk? That way. But it's even cooler, because he can MOVE things, kinda like when...you did that thing, y'know, with the car, and Crow. I caught him out once during an activity we were doing, you should have seen his face!! It was rrly funny._**

**Abra / 23:01PM: _I miss you._**

He feels warm when he reads over the messages from Abra. He knew she would enjoy it. He would go visit and assure Lucy to think the same, even though Abra had probably already bombarded her mother with all sorts of persuasions. He types in a reply:

_**Hey kid, I miss you too. Glad to hear you're enjoying the trip. I'll talk to your Mom, don't worry. She's got a lot going on right now. Don't be up too late. You'll be tired and get annoyed about it. X.** _

Dan goes to open the message from Lucy.

**Lucy / 01:48AM : _Please come over tomorrow, if you can. I know you have work that day but please try._**

He hesitates when typing in a response:

_**I'll see how my shifts work out and decide from there.** _

Dan is ready to drive off back home until realisation crosses the forefront of his mind. In a gradual panic he looks back at the messages Abra had sent him yesterday, and looked at the times in which they were sent. The second message made his gut plummet, and when he glanced at the forth he pieces up the situation like a puzzle without a picture but embodied all sorts of feelings.

 _Twenty-six minutes past six_ , Dan thinks. One minute past eleven.

He would have been parked outside the bar around then. Maybe contemplated about going inside. He would have sat with Lois. They would have left at eleven, just as Abra texted.

 _She must have tried to find me before that_ , Dan realises. _She must have seen Lois—fuck, what if she tried to find me after that? I would have been..._

Dan felt like shooting himself right then and there in the driver's seat of his car. If he had predicted correctly and Abra had found him without any struggle (much to his embarrassment and dismay, she probably had, she was a bright kid no doubt) Dan would have been in bed with Lois when Abra attempted to contact him.

"Fuck," he runs both hands through his hair, covers his face, "just, _fuck_."

The humiliation was indescribable. If his predictions were proven right the shame would multiply by a million and he would never be able to look Abra in the eye ever again.

* * *

When he rang the doorbell of Lucy's detached house Dan stood on the step for at least six minutes in what was initial patience, then frustration, and finally apprehension. She would have already answered the door by now. He slips his hand into one of his trouser pockets to locate his spare key. He checks the inside pocket of his jacket and finds the flat, battered brass object and turns it into the keyhole.

"Lucy?" He calls out as he shuts the door behind him, takes off his shoes, and wanders into the empty kitchen. He imagined what the house would be like if David was at the cooker or sink, warmly melting the silence of the house with his presence alone. 

Dan finds Lucy in the lounge, fast asleep on one of the couches with a fleece blanket loosely wrapped around her body. Upon observation Dan could see her eyelashes were black and matted, her lips parted ever so slightly, and she embodied the same milkiness of the dying patients in the hospice.

"Lucy." Dan half-whispers, and reaches out a hand to brush away a thin lock of hair from her closed eyes. Her breathing was similar to that of a newborn's. As he steps away she wakes.

"God," she mumbles as she sits up, her fingers resting against the back of her head, "when did you get in?"

"Just now."

"Oh. Okay."

"Everything alright?"

She glances up at him but doesn't respond. Then, with reluctance, "No. Not really. I don't know."

He goes to sit beside her, cautious in the way he moved. "You should stop obsessing over Abra. She's safe, you know."

Lucy shakes her head and makes the same notion with a bone-pale hand. "It's not that. I'm over that."

"Then what's annoying you?" Dan watches the woman sat at his side cross-legged on the couch. The blanket had slipped down her shoulders, but she was still clutching the corners of it. She wore a heavy knitted jumper with a low V-neck.

"I've been...having these dreams, lately." She states in small voice. "They're probably nothing compared to what you and Abra...experience...but...they're there. They feel _real_." she swallows, her glassy eyes elsewhere, staring into nothing. "It's almost like I've been there."

Dan blinks and is about to speak until she adds with a low tremor in her voice, "I want to be in them." She turns to face Dan, tearful. "David is in them."

He knew what she meant. He had the same experience with his mother when she died. He occasionally still finds her there, in the depths of his head, somewhere soft, a reservoir of watery silence with his mother peacefully preserved in the way he had always imagined and remembered her.

"You can—talk to people, right?" Lucy almost needles the broken question to irritate him, but he can sense that she didn't mean it that way. She was grappling with something that was blockading whatever she was trying to get out.

"Yeah." Dan says simply. "I do it everyday."

"No—I mean, not like that. Not that way. The other way. You know the other way?"

It came to him then. He comes out with it a little too quickly, because she seems to shrink out of the conversation, clearly overwhelmed. "Do you want me to talk to David?"

Dan could feel an emotional release emit from Lucy's body, and the mental strain he had picked up on the second he entered the house had vanished. He watches her without saying anything more. He waits for a response, but receives nothing. She simply gets up, slowly, carefully, as if she were old and dying with paper-dense bones, and shuffled into the kitchen. He listens to her movements, and she puts the kettle on.

He had sat with her until evening, and she eventually came round from being unusually closeted. They stayed on the sofa for the next few hours, spoke, only getting up for the bathroom, and remained in the lounge with the television switched on, the audio on low volume for extra company.

"I'm not used to the absence, that's all." Lucy clarifies for what felt like the umpteenth time, her hands clasped around another mug. "I'm sorry if I made you worry."

"No, no. You didn't." Dan says, trying not to over-emphasise the _'no, no'_ part. "You're allowed to feel like that. Don't beat yourself up for doing it."

"It's like I'm aligning Abra not being here with...David...not being here." She responds with an aimless gaze fixated on the television. "I can't help it. With everything that's happened—" she breathes deeply to calm herself. Dan could feel a quiver of muddled anger from her tone. "It...It confuses me, still. I suppose it will go away once she comes back and she stays," Lucy turned to him, and he was surprised to find her smiling a little. "It made me really angry when you appeared out of thin air, you know. I thought you had abducted her."

"Oh, yeah, I'm aware. You don't need to remind me." He replies, unfazed by the memory of being wrongly accused solely based on his working-man appearance. "You all thought I was going to manipulate her into loving me."

Manipulation and abduction was an understatement. Dan remembers, now with a slight fondness, David wanting to suffocate him on the front drive of the house when he appeared alongside Abra as if he were some threatening phantom. He was initially terrified at first, never having been in a situation with an insane amount of miscommunication floating left-right-and-centre, but then quickly found himself admiring David's selflessness. 

Fatherhood would always be different to what Dan was now to Abra. Upon seeing the two of them in the drive it was more than easy to automatically suspect a questionable relationship, but it was far from that.

Lucy tries not to laugh. The event was definitely not a laughing matter when it had happened. "If anything it'd be the other way round." Dan adds quietly, "she's a lot stronger than I am." Then, with a slight, shy tenderness that nibbled at his insides, "She probably gets it from you."

"Wow. That's cute." Lucy responds rather flatly.

"I'm serious. I wouldn't lie about that."

"Keep that up and you mind find yourself a girl."

Dan felt a pang of resentment in the way she said that. Though he knew she didn't mean it, and neither of them thought about it that way, but he found it bothersome. He preferred using the term _'young woman'_ much more than _'girl'_ when it came to calling and identifying the age of someone. He thought of Lois and her iridescent skin and her naive gentleness, and suddenly felt a lot older than what he actually was. A sharp jab of guilt pierced his gut.

"Yeah." He says dismissively, his response somewhat too late for Lucy's statement. He feels her eyes settle on the side of his face.

"Something bothering you?"

He replies in a hurry this time, and the reaction blew his cover completely. "What? No. No, there isn't."

"Well, how has your week been so far?"

Unable to mentally compose himself he's inevitably reminded of the sex. "Great. It's been great."

She was pressing it now. "Great?"

When he turns to face her she's smiling, and he so badly wants to tell her to stop but he was clever enough to know that would only rise her suspicions. He stares at the television and doesn't say anything. There was nothing to say. Nothing to disclose, nothing he had to disclose.

Dan senses the impression of her rising curiosity and cuts off her train of thought before she can open her mouth again, "I'd better go."

"Ah—yeah," Lucy remarks as she checks her phone, "it's late."

* * *

Two days later he was working a shift at the tourist attraction in the quaint town centre of Frazier.

Billy had fallen ill and had been married to his bed for the past few days, leaving Dan to take care of his shift within the attraction. It didn't bother him, nor did it affect the hours he worked in the hospice. He enjoyed the still air and liked to observe his surroundings.

It wasn't until he found Lois tracing wherever he walked within the area that he wanted the ground to swallow him up, and he wished Billy was present so he had someone else to focus his energy into, an excuse to not acknowledge her presence.

"Hi." Lois says, hands behind her back, smiling. She wasn't meant to be here. Dan had assumed the two of them would treat the unravelling string that connected them as a private affair, not something that should be broadcasted in daylight. This was nightly, obscured, private affair. Nothing more and nothing less.

Dan noticed she was wearing the dress from the night they had met; she had somehow fixed the torn fabric at the front, and he cringed at the recollection. He saw how effortlessly stitched together it was. Swallowing with an apprehensive confidence, he says, "Hi."

"You work here?"

He dismisses her small-talk question, and cuts to what he wanted to know. "How did you find me?"

Lois shrugs. "I just looked around. It was pretty easy."

"Don't you have places to be? Things to do?"

Lois grins. "I'm on vacation."

"That a joke?"

She shakes her head, falls into step with him as he walks.

"I like you." She finally says, her face innocent. "Are you free tonight?"

Dan looks at her. "No."

"Liar. I can see right through you."

"I'm not lying."

"I thought older guys liked girls more than women their own age."

"They do. Most do." Dan suddenly thinks of his father and the affair he had with Lucy's mother, supposedly before they resided at the Overlook Hotel. He felt sick.

"Then what's your issue?"

"You remind me of someone, that's all."

"Who?"

"I'm not sure. Even if I knew I wouldn't tell you."

She playfully bumps into the side of his arm, expecting him to react, but he doesn't. Dan senses her lightheartedness fade, and for a moment he feels a sliver of guilt for putting her out of what seemed to be a happy mood.

"If you're not free tonight, how about lunch?" She suggests. "There's a diner down the road from here. We could walk?"

 _Just leave before I do something really stupid_ , Dan thinks. He breathes in. _Find a deterrent for fuck's sake, shake the girl off, for her own good._ "Sure. I finish my shift in hour." He lied. His shift (Billy's actually) ended thirty minutes ago. But he expects the 'hour' part of his reply would make her slump her shoulders and give up and return to wherever she had came from (surely no one would have that amount of patience to wait?) and Dan could make his escape, but to his numb embarrassment she does the total opposite.

Lois beams. "Okay. I'll wait—" she stops and glances around at her surroundings, then points to a nearby bench, which coincidentally happened to be the one Abra and Dan sat at when they had first met, "—over there."

Struck dumb, Dan watches the frail-limbed girl make her way to the bench and turns away just as she sits down. _Shit, shit._

He could have just left right then and there, walked off the square piece of grass and fifteen minutes across the block to his tenancy, and forget Lois forever, but he ended up getting caught in the trap of silent panic and killed at least twelve minutes of his time by doing literally nothing but repeating what he had just done during his extra shift.

Unable to bare the self-inflicted shame he walks over to Lois. "I lied."

"You lied?" She repeats, looking up from her cellphone. Dan couldn't remember the last time he had seen someone using one of those, especially within her generation. He had one somewhere; he remembered Abra's fascination upon pressing the blocky buttons and squinting at the screen.

Dan felt like he was at confession. "Yeah. About the shift. And tonight."

She stands up. "You're free now?" Her height just reached his shoulder.

Dan blinks. "Yeah."

* * *

They sat in a booth hidden from the prying eyes within the diner Lois had pointed out beforehand, even though there was only three tables that were currently being served. 

Dan watches her drum her fingers against the greasy surface of the table— _like a kid_ , he thinks. He tried not to compare Lois to Abra but couldn't help but think of the opposing age difference and the mentality of the two. Now that he had encountered a girl pushing twenty still reenacting the behaviour of a ten year old, Abra seemed incredibly mature for her age. Unless Lois had other issues—if Dan had to choose, ADHD would be the fitter emblem for what she seemed to be naturally impersonating.

"So, what do you do?" Lois asks in a low tone as she leant across the table, speaking as if there were invisible people sitting with them (which there weren't; Dan would have sussed them out way before they even entered the diner). 

"I work at the local hospice. And part-time at the tourist attraction you found me at." Dan answers. 

"A hospice?" She repeats it as if she's never heard it before. _I suppose it isn't a typical everyday job_ , Dan thinks.

"I don't completely specialise in the medical side of it, though. I'm like...a comforter...of sorts." Dan says.

"And it's just you—" Lois replies, and a waitress with smudged blue eyeliner is suddenly stood at the table with a notepad in hand. She had chipped pink nail polish. Lois ordered a vanilla milkshake, Dan asked for a coke, and they agreed on sharing a platter of chips and two beef burgers.

"What about you?" He changes the subject before she can delve any further into his profession, because if she did he knew wouldn't be able to shape a perfect altered-truth on the spot.

"I told you, I'm on vacation." She claims as though it were a secret but Dan was already used to her constant enthusiasm.

"Away from home are we?" He gently challenges.

"Hm." She nods in certainty, but then nearly immediately afterward her confidence softens, and her shoulders slope. She glances off to the side. "I...don't know for how long, though. I didn't really think about that." Her eyes light up then, "Perhaps when I realise I'm broke, I'll go back home."

Dan lets out a quiet laugh. The familiarity of it wasn't the best, but the tonality of the conversation effectively masked the horrid memory of his ex-alcoholism. "Yeah. I've been there before. Although, I ended up here. I didn't go back to where I was originally based."

If Dan could change the course of time he still wouldn't intervene with the event of the Overlook Hotel. No intervention meant out of mind and out of sight, but not necessarily out of total existence. Despite the shivers and shudders the thought of the place gave him he wouldn't want it to completely disappear. It stood as a grim reminder to him to never completely show yourself to someone, whether that be physically or mentally. His sub-conscious applied this knowledge wherever he went.

As far as Dan was concerned, the only person that will always help you is yourself—and everyone knows that, but nobody will ever say it to someone's face in fear of being considered a narrow-minded and undeniably self-centred person, when in reality they are being purely factual with their opinions.

"Why not go back?" Lois asks, though her tone is clearly disinterested. She was saying it for the sake of saying it whilst being more attentive to drinking her milkshake once the waitress reproached with what they had ordered.

"I try to keep a linear state of mind." He responds.

"That's clever," She points out. Dan can't tell if she was being serious or not. "I don't do that. It's too detached."

* * *

The irony of Lois' words rang throughout Dan's mind well after they left the diner. She said his approach to abandoning bad memories was detached; he could read her like an open book. She was completely naked to his mind's eye, her thoughts and feelings and hints of what she was planning next were plastered all over her like some skeletal, tightly-wound papier-mâché doll. Despite Dan's efforts to analyse her there was a wall that separated something deeper and painfully complex. Beneath her bubbly and childishly-trusting exterior sat a sort of a sleeping (and what Dan could only describe from his brief mental skinny-dip into her psyche) ferocity that diffused a smouldering heat, was which gave Dan a faint headache every time he attempted to calculate her. Lois wasn't special—there was no Shine in her—but she was difficult to read.

"Can we make a deal?" Lois pipes.

Dan sighs, and stops walking. Shortly after lunch Lois had stuck to him for the rest of the day, and they stayed out—they had just left one of Frazier's muffled street corner cafes. The cold bitter evening made Dan shudder even though he was wearing three layers. He couldn't understand how she wasn't freezing wearing that damn dress with bruised bare legs and a lightweight jacket manufactured from some flimsy material. "Depends what it is."

"I like you." Lois blurts for the second time, and Dan turns to look at her face.

"What do you want, Lois."

She thinks. Dan had known the answer to his own question before they had left the diner. "Come home with me?"

* * *

This continued as a recurring cycle with a half-stitched end.

Even though Dan's relationship with Lois only lasted several days, the time he spent with her was drawn out to what felt like months. 

She had warmed to Dan since she had found him at the bar and stuck almost immediately. He couldn't understand her commitment. Or rather, her tendency in looking for the wrong affection—and he knew at some point, sooner or later, that trait would lead to an eventual breakdown. 

He warmed to her, but not for the right reasons; the mental blockage in her psyche was what he wanted to filter through—Lois needed help—but was unsure if proceeding with what he was planning would do more harm than good, because as he had established before, there was a dormant turbulence beneath her smile. 

It happened the day before Abra was due to come home. 

Dan had previously called Lucy to say he would drive with her to the airport, before deciding how to wrap up the dilemma with Lois. He instantly got cold feet and chose not to confront her, receiving a horrible case of deja vu as he attempted to slip out of her motel bed at six o'clock in the morning—envisioning the woman and her toddler claw at his arms to drag him back—and quietly began to get dressed.

Lois was sitting upright in the bed when Dan turned to lift his keys from the bedside table. He froze when he met her intense gaze, her skin a deep, powdery blue from the early dawn that flooded the room from the bare window.

"Why do you keep leaving?" She inquires. What was meant to be a timid question sounded more of an accusation toward him.

"I have things to do," he breaks their eye-contact and lifts his keys. "When you get older you have more responsibilities to take care of."

"No, this is...different." She says. Dan felt her trying to work things out as she spoke. He didn't like it. But in a way he had inevitably brought her suspicion upon himself. He could only blame his actions.

"I have to be somewhere important tomorrow, Lois." Dan explains shortly. He didn't want to get into anything too personal. He didn't want to mention Abra, nor Lucy. He hadn't mentioned much to her at all, come to think of it.

She's out of the bed now, wearing a long t-shirt with a hem that stopped mid-thigh. In the low light Dan could make out her narrowing, glassy eyes.

"Is that it, then." She says, a tremor in the lowest note of her voice. She was about to crack.

"...Is that...what?" Dan adds.

In one swift yet frantic movement Lois reaches for an empty shot glass sat on her bedside table, and hurls it straight at Dan. He dodges the throw by mere inches, and it shatters against the wall behind him. Her chest was heaving, and her breaths were short and shallow, as if she were about to burst into tears, but she forces it back and instead mutters. "You're just like all of them."

Dan doesn't say anything. It felt wrong to speak, never mind even giving a reply.

"I give what I can to make someone _stay_." Lois shouts. "I give what I know I won't get _back_ —and still, every single one _leaves_. I didn't think you would join them. I thought you were different."

"Lois—"

"You want to why I really came here?"

He watches the expression on her face change.

"I came here to find someone. I've been doing this since I was fourteen—going from one man to the next," Her voice withdraws to a trembling, meek note. "I thought it would have been you, Dan."

Dan felt paralysed. Overcome with all sorts, he's unable to respond in his usual, matter-of-fact, muted approach, and ends up not saying anything. He looks at her in the eyes, and the wall of her psyche suddenly cracks straight down the middle. It crumbles to reveal a figure—the wrench in his relationship with Lois.

"You—" Dan stops, blinks twice, confused but fully aware with the load of foreign images and memories piling into the front of his train of thought, "—you should go back to him." He can feel her stab of realisation at his words. Or maybe it was panic? "He misses you," Dan swallows. "So just stop. _Stop_ running away. Go back."

Lois is shaken. "How—how do you know that?" _Shit_ , Dan thinks. _You've really done it now_ , Danny.

"This is a fuck-up," He utters under his breath, panicked. He looks at her. "I need to leave. I'm sorry." As Dan goes for the door Lois appears like a phantom right at his side, a silvery, translucent hand desperately grasping his wrist.

"You can _read_ people," She half-whispers, half-terrified and half-fascinated. "You've known all this already, haven't you?"

This was the last thing Dan had wanted to happen. This was why he never got involved with anyone. This was why he kept himself alone and desolate—the Shining just screws his every chance at capturing some form of normality wherever he went.

"Just—go back, wherever the fuck that is. Wherever the fuck you were before—go back." Dan mutters the words in a subdued voice without meeting her fixated stare of what was previously aversion, but now touched with a tinge of frightened curiosity. "I don't want to stay with someone that's already tied to someone else," he continues. He blinks and dips his mind into her psyche; he sees a young man of twenty-five languishing in a telephone box with sad eyes. Dan turns to Lois. "You should go home. Don't stay here anymore."

She's tearful and withdrawn when she slowly let's go of his wrist. A flash of fury ignited within him then, and to enforce the importance of what he had just told her, he grabs her by both arms, Lois flinching as he pulls her dangerously close. His thumbs press into her bones and the intimacy that had glued them together had been replaced with an underlying violence. "Do you understand? You can't stay here. You don't belong here. _You need to go_ _home_."

When Lois lets out a hitched sob and lowers her head Dan sees before him, not the girl he had met a week ago with a woman's body and a bumpy charisma that drew him in like a fish painstakingly hooked through the lip, but a lanky, unhinged and severely adrift teenager who was no older than Abra.

When she finally mumbles out the response he wanted to hear, Dan cups her face and presses his lips to her brow before opening the door—leaving for good. 

* * *

"Good morning." Lucy says as she wraps an assertive arm around Dan's neck, the softness of her cheek pressing against the side of his face. She was cold. Abra was due to get off the plane at six in the morning.

"You...seem excited." Dan responds as they get into the car. He had insisted on driving today. 'For safety' he remembered thinking when they agreed who would be behind the wheel. Lucy tugs at her seatbelt.

"I'm just relieved." She answers subduedly. "We'll be back to normal."

He agrees with a faint nod as he pulls out of the driveway and onto the settlement road. Everything would go back to normal. Abra will be home, Lucy's nightmares will cease, and Lois will disappear. Dan felt a pang of resentment toward himself when he thought of the wispy-haired girl—the barefoot, carefree, alluring, celestial spirit that wore elastic cotton dresses that tore when a man merely touched them. _Somebody shoot me already_ , Dan thinks.

The drive was peacefully silent, and the flat horizon that surrounded every part of them reminded Dan of his last journey to Colorado, to the Overlook Hotel. The gruelling drive there with Abra had been an oddly relaxing standstill amidst the chaos, and upon remembering the whole experience he felt a content, opium-soaked numbness that gave him a hazy recollection of the trauma. The episode was merely a silent film now, and it was beginning to feel somewhat distant—in a good way.

When they reach the airport the sky is a gentle, lavender-like blue that embodied the smell of post-rainfall. Lucy latches herself onto one of Dan's arms as they walk through the parking lot, the blocky sound of her heeled boots against the wet concrete ground a somewhat comforting noise. 

They're met with a gust of warmth when they pass through the automatic doors of the airport, and they stand in the arrivals area to wait for Abra. Dan noticed a few other parents stood a few metres away from them.

"I hope she's enjoyed herself." Lucy says.

"She said she made a new friend." He replies.

"So I heard."

She goes on to say something else, but it wasn't really relevant, let alone interesting enough for him to look her in the face and acknowledge her, because in that moment Dan happens to cast an upward glance to where the check-in was for departures, and stood near to the front of the line was Lois.

She had her dark hair tied into a messy bun which accentuated her angular cheekbones which made her look more awake. She had no suitcase, but carried a duffel bag on her back, and was sucking on her bottom lip and typing something into her bricky cellphone. Little hands and dainty fingers quick and agile. Long legs. Beautiful. She could do with eating a little more. He flicks his eyes up at the screen above the check-in she was stood at. It read in bold capitals: **_PARIS, FRANCE_**. _French boyfriend_ , Dan thinks. _Romantic_.

He must have been looking for quite a bit, because the next time he turns to Lucy she's staring holes into the side of his face.

"Someone caught your eye?" She asks.

Dan blinks. _Fuck_. "What? No. Just observing." When she looks at him blankly he tries another response. "It's...kind of entertaining in a place like this." He finds himself glancing back at Lois. "There's a lot going on inside people's heads. It's overwhelming."

A group of students appeared through the arrivals exit, and, exactly like two weeks before, Abra stood out amongst them with a spirited glow Dan could locate and decipher in less than a second. A shot of blinding sunshine. An everlasting burning star. A little girl of radiant unpredictability—he suddenly feels a pair of intrusive, familiarly intense pair of eyes settle on him as Abra approaches Lucy with a wide smile.

"My beautiful girl," Lucy laughs as she embraces her daughter with locking arms. "You're finally back!"

Abra rolls her eyes, still smiling. "You're acting as if I've been gone for months, Mom." She turns to Dan with a splinter of shyness. _Fuck, she's probably seen it all_ , Dan thinks as he's caught between the thought of Lois and the homecoming of his niece and the pesky motherly jabs of Lucy. "Uncle Dan isn't overreacting. See?"

"Well, your uncle clearly isn't as sensitive. He spent his time aimlessly. A bit lost without you, actually." Lucy responds with a lopsided smile, as if to say, implied toward Dan _'I know what you've been doing'._

"I missed you." Abra half-giggles. She reaches up to wrap her arms around his neck, and as Dan buries his nose into the collar of her hoodie he glances upward to the check-in area to find Lois staring right at him. 

Their eyes meet, and it's like all those other times, when the world suddenly prolongs itself to saturate a single instant. Dan wondered what she was truly thinking with those glittering, flitting, animal-like eyes. There was a tenderness etched into her face as she watched him embracing his niece, with an observant expression, as if she had come to terms with something she had been grappling with for a long time; she wore the expression of relief—a look of disclosure, with a timid hint of a smile showing at the corners of her mouth, and the Lois Dan had initially encountered at the bar resurfaced, but with a new path in mind to follow.

"Shall we go then?" Lucy's voice cuts through the moment, and Dan draws his gaze away from Lois, and lets go of Abra. She was grasping the cuffs of his jacket with her fingers. 

"Yeah, I'm kinda tired. Long flight." Abra remarks to her mother who curled a comforting arm around her shoulders.

Dan feels a weight lift from his chest, but not a bad one—it was more of an achievement of sorts, similar to that of holding someone's hand as they died, but this time assisting someone in locating the right direction to pursue. 

When they go to leave, Dan casts a final backward glance—only to find Lois had disappeared.


End file.
